Stop it with Yer Dang “Hebrew Fiction”

Oh there’s Netanel, off on another of his patented rants about Hebrew fiction and how much he hates it.

My beef is with

650 _ 0 Hebrew fiction.

and its very good friend:

650 _ 0 Israeli fiction.

If I had a Spanish-language specialty, I’d probably be complaining about Spanish fiction, but my specialty is Hebrew, so here we are.

Now look, you know and I know (and I know that you know) that subjects belong in 650s and genre/forms belong in 655s, we’re not going to rehash that whole biz here.

You, right now.

So then why am I even bringing this up? Well here’s the thing, I feel you. There currently aren’t any LCGFT terms which adequately cover “language of fiction” or “national origin of fiction” — heck I’ll even give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re trying to enter

655 _ 7 Hebrew fiction $2 lcsh

and maybe OCLC is just flipping it to a 650 upon controlling the heading. Because the thing is people do want access to their fiction by these facets, so I understand your impetus to give them that access.

What I’m suggesting is that we’re going about this the wrong way. If we push for authorizing every “$language fiction” and “$nation fiction” as LCGFT terms, we’re going to end up with the same bloat we currently suffer from in LCSH.

Let’s leverage the metadata we already have to give users these facets. The “Lang” element (characters 35-57 in the 008 field) contains a three digit code which can be dereferenced into a language. The “Ctry” element (characters 15-17 in an 008) contains a code which can be dereferenced into country of publication.

Write a macro that upon presence of a ‘1’ or ‘f’ in “LitF” (character 33 in an 008 or 16 in an 006) generates a 655 of “X fiction” upon export. We can treat them as we do pattern headings and any [Language] fiction is allowed, without needing to add every term individually.

“Ctry” is place of publication of this manifestation — if for example (her example to be precise), you were cataloging a Canadian publication of Tintin, you’d end up with

655 _ 7 Canadian fiction.

When of course Tintin is Belgian.

FEAR NOT — I HAVE IMMEDIATELY SHIFTED MY IDEA

Linked data.

Pretty good idea, right?

No, but seriously — in the work Name Authority Record — place of origin of work (RDA 6.5) is recorded in 370 $g. Our more-clever and powerful cataloging tools will be able to easily fetch that data for us. Problem solved.